You wait all your life for a rat-nibbled book to come along and then two turn up at once. First to land was Emily Gravett's Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears, which won the prestigious Greenaway medal for children's illustration in June. Her daughter's pet rats Button and Mr Moo contributed to the creative process by eating the edges of each page of the original manuscript. They also provided their own brand of "watercolour".

No sooner had the excitement of that died down than another book arrives with its corners chewed away. The eponymous Firmin, of Sam Savage's novel, is the runt of a litter born in a shredded copy of Finnegans Wake in the basement of a run-down Boston bookstore where he develops a passion for literature (lettuce, he complains, tastes much like Jane Eyre).

It's true that two rats do not make a plague, but if you extend the definition to animal narrators in general, then something is definitely going on, with August in particular shaping up as a beast of a month. Besides the rodent as reader, there's a wolf's eye view of nature and fantasy from Joseph Smith (The Wolf) and a gorilla's experience of war-torn Africa from Nick Taussig (Gorilla Guerrilla).

All three are adult novels, which are apparently ambling into an anthropomorphic territory that's usually the preserve of children. Synchronicity is always intriguing and one could construct all sorts of theories as to why this particular trend has emerged now (the comfort of animal stories in troubled times perhaps?).

My own hunch is that it is to do with an exhaustion with first person narrative. That's certainly the case with Me Cheeta, due out from Fourth Estate in the Autumn, in which the septuagenarian veteran of the Tarzan films gives his warts and all account of the golden age of Hollywood.

It turns out that Cheeta is indeed still alive, and living in a retirement home in Palm Springs, where he paints and plays the piano. He's cited by the Guinness book of Records as the oldest known non-human primate and celebrated his 75th birthday last year with Johnny Weissmuller's widow Diane (what could sound more like a post-modern joke than that?).

No co-author is being credited for Me Cheeta, which gives a whole new twist to the idea of the ghosted celebrity autobiography. The fact that it's being published in time to catch the Christmas market, and will therefore be in competition with this year's Sharon Osbornes and Russell Brands, is - as Cheeta himself might have said before the unfortunate incident with the black mamba - the very best sort of bananas.